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Slashdot Stories Firehose All Popular Polls Ask EventsSoftware Newsletter Jobs Submit Search Slashdot Login or Sign up Topics: Devices Build Entertainment Technology Open Source Science YRO more...Follow us: RSS Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Youtube Mastodon Newsletter Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive Nickname: Password: Public Terminal Forgot your password? Close binspam dupe notthebest offtopic slownewsday stale stupid fresh funny insightful interesting maybe offtopic flamebait troll redundant overrated insightful interesting informative funny underrated descriptive typo dupe error !Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge’s nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! × 173862567 story Apple and Google Introduce Alerts for Unwanted Bluetooth Tracking 2222 Posted by msmash on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:00PM from the shared-battles dept. Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called " Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers " to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking . Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is detected moving with them. The move comes after numerous cases of trackers like Apple’s AirTags being used for malicious purposes . Several Bluetooth tag companies have committed to making their future products compatible with the new standard. Apple and Google said they will continue collaborating with the Internet Engineering Task Force to further develop this technology and address the issue of unwanted tracking.173862327 story Microsoft Places Uses AI To Find the Best Time For Your Next Office Day 4545 Posted by msmash on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:01PM from the how-about-that dept. An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is attempting to solve the hassle of coordinating with colleagues on when everyone will be in the office. It’s a problem that emerged with the increase in hybrid and flexible work after the recent covid-19 pandemic, with workers spending less time in the office. Microsoft Places is an AI-powered app that goes into preview today and should help businesses that rely on Outlook and Microsoft Teams to better coordinate in-office time together . "When employees get to the office, they don’t want to be greeted by a sea of empty desksthey want face-time with their manager and the coworkers they collaborate with most frequently," says Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI at work, Jared Spataro, in a blog post. "With Places, you can more easily coordinate across coworkers and spaces in the office."173860949 story Microsoft is Finally Changing Word’s Annoying Default Paste Behavior (pcworld.com) 6666 Posted by msmash on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:08PM from the national-nightmare dept. An anonymous reader shares a report: The default pasting behavior of Microsoft Word is a nightmare, and has been forever. If you want to add a text or image using the standard option, you can easily mess up the entire formatting in the text if a completely different font suddenly appears. After many years of complaints, Microsoft is finally listening to user feedback and changing the default behavior when pasting in Word . From now on, the source’s formatting will no longer be automatically retained. Instead, "Merge formatting" will be the new default for everyone, as Microsoft explained in a blog post this week. This means that after the update, newly pasted text will take on the font size, font type, and color of the text written in Word. However, special features such as lists or italicized elements will be retained. If you want these elements to be automatically adapted to the Word text, you must select the option "Keep text only."173858785 story Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers’ Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season (404media.co) 9090 Posted by msmash on Monday May 13, 2024 @12:48PM from the concerning-episodes dept. mspohr shares a report: The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment. One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are "extremely compromised," and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years. "All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm," Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. "No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday." Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with "Real-Time Kinematic" (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere "StarFire" receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating "correction" data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.173837935 story Black Basta Ransomware Attack Brought Down Ascension IT Systems, Report Finds (crn.com) 1717 Posted by BeauHD on Saturday May 11, 2024 @06:00AM from the accelerated-occurrences dept. The Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta is responsible for Wednesday’s cyberattack on St. Louis-based Ascension health system , according to sources reported by CNN . The attack disrupted access to electronic health records, some phone systems and "various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications," the company said in a statement . From a report: On Friday, the nonprofit group Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) issued an alert about the group, saying that Black Basta has "recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector." HHS said that Black Basta was initially spotted in early 2022, known for its double extortion attack. The group not only executes ransomware but also exfiltrates sensitive data, operating a cybercrime marketplace to publicly release it should a victim fail to pay a ransom. "The level of sophistication by its proficient ransomware operators, and reluctance to recruit or advertise on Dark Web forums, supports why many suspect the nascent Black Basta may even be a rebrand of the Russian-speaking RaaS threat group Conti, or also linked to other Russian-speaking cyber threat groups," the alert from HHS said. According to one report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and cybersecurity risk-focused Corvus Insurance, Black Basta in less than two years has won itself more than $100 million via ransomware schemes from 329 organizations. Previous victims of its attacks include Dish Network, the American Dental Association, business process services firm Capita and tech firm ABB.173833251 story FBI Working Towards Nabbing Scattered Spider Hackers, Official Says (reuters.com) 1313 Posted by msmash on Friday May 10, 2024 @11:23AM from the tussle-continues dept. The U.S. FBI is working towards charging hackers from the aggressive Scattered Spider criminal gang who are largely...